Teacher/Parent Appreciation: Class Projects

Here are a pair of projects that I used this year for my daughter's class.  

I took a few chalkboards to school and took  two photos of each child: one telling what their favorite subject their teacher taught them and one telling what they want to be when they grow up.  

I used the first for teacher appreciation week... I printed this as an 11x14 and framed it.   

The next one I printed as an 8x10 and brought several copies for the parents to keep.

Fun little keepsakes for both the parents and the teachers!

Digital Design: More Christmas Cards!

Christmas cards designed for 2011!!

These are showing the front of the card on the left/top and back of the card on the right/bottom.

A Merry Little Christmas| Digital Design

The past few months my creative outlet has been focused on my photography and digital design in the form of Christmas cards!! 

I am excited to share a few that I have designed now that they have been sent out and there will be no ruined suprises from the wonderful families I have photographed this season. 

For now, here is the card I designed for my own family!  Thank you to my wonderful friend and talented photographer Alice Addington of Addington Images for the photographs of our family!  They are a true treasure.

Organization: Kids Toy Bin Labels

This summer we made some big strides as far as the organization goes in our house. 

Claire's room has been an orgizational nightmare for awhile.  She is just at an age where she does enjoy playing with most everything she has and it doesn't seem to matter how much effort she puts into keeping things picked up and sorted... the toys always end up in a big pile. There just wasn't a place for everything.  Not good. 

So, I found this shelving and canvas bin system at Costco and thought I would give it a try.  Once I put the shelf together, Claire and I went through her toys with a 'Less is More' mentality and really tried to reduce the toys she wanted to keep.  I felt that including her in the process helped her understand that we just don't have room in our home to fit EVERYTHING, and that when we only keep what we love it is much easier to find the toys we want to play with.  (Ok, so I would like to think that is what she learned... but if nothing else she did not get upset that we sold or donated many of her old toys and stuffed animals.)

We ended up with seven categories for our eight bins and I headed online to find some ideas for cute labels.  While there were plenty of cute kid's toy bin labels available, I just didn't find any that really fit my style or the color scheme for Claire's room.  I also wanted to make sure the labels included pictures for my pre-schooler who can not read yet. 

Here is what I came up with ... colorful and organized labels, printed at Costco as 4x6 matte finish prints for $0.13 each - actually they were printed two-to-a-print, so 6.5 cents each!